Poetry by Peter Cowlam

Cultivations

Things over here are only intimations,
Flickers, non-lucent, light as obfuscation,
Detail vanishing in air.

The gardens do not deserve the fate we have
Designated, emptied of the beings who made
Them. They have gone. Their flora I cannot name,
And no one is called back, not from the two-lane
Rutted tracks repeating into the distance.

Strange ornamentation signals it is night.
A black moon rises, of a type I have not
Seen before, its sky washed with vermilion,
And flown all round with bits of robotic
Detritus. That must have meant an industry.



Cold Conjuration

The one trick gone fatally wrong
shows as a drunk, demurring moon
in a pall of crimson smoke.

The magician – a mistake,
yes – intended humble peoples,
temples, oblations, and got only murmurs,
however much he waved a silk handkerchief.

We stumbled for the exits, demanding
our admission fee, and found nothing
but eternities, a frenzy of wild horses
on a thunderous waste of ice.




NDE

Clues to the near-death country
I was in. Odd colours the rock
Was veined in, and what kind of tree
Roots, and the road bending out of there,
And the way inanimate things reacted.
There were flaws in the terrain
Where I had fallen through the cracks,
Lit with electricity, the thing I almost died
From. Smoke, cloud, dust. A leaf bending.
Blossom across a stream. Life, a pivot back,
As it returned.

About the poet

Peter Cowlam studied Performance Writing at Dartington College of Arts. He has had plays performed at the Barbican Theatre, Plymouth, and by the Dartington Playgoers, and has had readings at the State University of New York and for the Theatre West 100 Plays project in Bristol, England.

As a novelist, he has won the Quagga Prize for Literary Fiction twice, most recently in 2018 for his novel New King Palmers, which is at the intersection of old, crumbling empires and new, digital agglomerates. The Quagga Prize is awarded for independently published works of fiction. In total he has had three novels and four novellas published independently.

He has had four collections of haikuesque poems published (one in collaboration with Kathryn Kopple), also independently, and as poet and writer of fiction his work has appeared in The Battersea Review, The San Francisco Review of Books, The Blue Nib, The Galway Review, Easy Street, Literary Matters, Eunoia Review, The Brown Boat, Valparaiso Fiction Review, The Four Quarters Magazine, Ink, Sweat & Tears, The Liberal, the Criterion, and others.